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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
International Law And Theories Of Global Justice: Remarks, Steven R. Ratner, James Stewart, Jiewuh Song, Carmen Pavel
International Law And Theories Of Global Justice: Remarks, Steven R. Ratner, James Stewart, Jiewuh Song, Carmen Pavel
Articles
International law (IL) and political philosophy represent two rich disciplines for exploring issues of global justice. At their core, each seeks to build a better world based on some universally agreed norms, rules, and practices, backed by effective institutions. International lawyers, even the most positivist of them, have some underlying assumptions about a just world order that predisposes their interpretive methods; legal scholars have incorporated concepts of justice in their work even as their overall pragmatic orientation has limited the nature of their inquiries. Many philospophers, for their part, have engaged with IL to some extent—at a minimum recognizing that …
Notes In Defense Of The Iraq Constitution, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Notes In Defense Of The Iraq Constitution, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Articles
This paper is a defense of sorts of the Iraqi constitution, arguing that the language used in it was wisely designed to allow some level of flexibility, such that highly divided political forces could find incremental solutions to the deep rooted sources of division that have plagued Iraqi society since its inception. That Iraq has found itself in such dreadful political circumstances since constitutional ratification is therefore not a function of the open ended constitutional bargain, but rather of the failure of Iraqi legal and political elites to make use of the space that the constitution provided them to develop …
Indivisibility And Linkage Arguments: A Reply To Gilabert, James W. Nickel
Indivisibility And Linkage Arguments: A Reply To Gilabert, James W. Nickel
Articles
This reply discusses Pablo Gilabert's response to my article, "Rethinking Indivisibility." It welcomes his distinction between conceptual, normative, epistemic, and causal forms of support from one right to another. It denies, however, that "Rethinking Indivisibility" downplayed linkage arguments for human rights (although it did call for careful evaluation of such arguments), and rejects Gilabert's suggestion that we understand the indivisibility of two rights as two rights being highly useful to each other (interdependence) rather than as mutual indispensability. In the final section, I offer two new worries about the system-wide indivisibility of human rights.
The Mote In Thy Brother’S Eye: A Review Of Human Rights As Politics And Idolatry, William M. Carter Jr.
The Mote In Thy Brother’S Eye: A Review Of Human Rights As Politics And Idolatry, William M. Carter Jr.
Articles
Michael Ignatieffs provocatively titled collection of essays, Human Rights As Politics and Idolatry [hereinafter Human Rights], is a careful examination of the theoretical underpinnings and contradictions in the area of human rights. At bottom, both of his primary essays, Human Rights As Politics and Human Rights As Idolatry, make a claim that is perhaps contrary to the instincts of human rights thinkers and activists: namely, that international human rights can best be philosophically justified and effectively applied to the extent that they strive for minimal ism. Human rights activists generally argue for the opposite conclusion: that international human rights be …